Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
An important sociological lens through which to view World War Two is the nutrition lens. We're often told of pre-war Germany's economic ambitions, their racism, and their hope of ascension to lone global superpower, but we're rarely told that they simply needed farmland. In fact, it's been said that the Third Reich's invasion of Poland had less to do with politics or strategy, and more to do with the acquisition of arable soil for growing food. And, for me, this perspective begs the question, "Were the Third Reich simply following the basic human impulse to acquire food, or did they understand something more fundamental about human behavior, as it relates to the success or failure of a society?" For my money, and given that Marx and Engels both lived in Germany, I suspect that the designers of the Third Reich understood human behavior, both individually and in groups, to be largely a response to material environment. In other words, Hitler knew that, in order to win any serious military conflict with the League of Nations, he would need not only a well-nourished fighting force, but a fighting force psychologically primed for success in every area of life; primed in a way that can only come from the deep psychological security which human beings garner by consistently having their material needs met.
The (white, male, land-owning citizens of the) United States have enjoyed a similar material bounty for over two centuries. On a subconscious level, Americans have assumed success in most pursuits. We expect success in schools. We expect success in the global marketplace. We expect success in the arts. We expect success in the Olympics. We expect success on the battlefield. Without even realizing it, Americans have come to expect an almost effortless location at the top of most social hierarchies, if for no other reason than tradition. And if a single explanation for this expectation can suffice, that explanation must be as follows: throughout the course of westward expansion, Americans have only ever encountered a stasis or an increase in material bounty. Even as capitalism has made material commodities more difficult for the American working class to obtain, forcing the transition of our economy to a credit-based economy, the American standard of living, thanks largely to American military hegemony and the strategic partnering of the American military-industrial complex with foreign powers, has either remained static or improved.
Until now.
Climate change will supercede any and all foundations of American material surplus. With super-droughts in the American southwest, constant hurricanes in the Gulf states, the northward shift of farmable land, the inundation of Southern Florida, the Mississippi River delta, and much of the eastern seaboard, combined with all of the civil fallout of material scarcity, even America's famed "Protestant work ethic" will pale in the face of true material scarcity. There will be no new land to the west, from which to gather material resources. There will be no technological solution; (carbon capture, carbon sequestration, etc., are still well inside their infancy, as if the political will to seriously implement them existed anyway). There will be no international alliance which can be formed against the ravages of diminishing human habitat. There are no bombs that can be dropped on withering human habitat.
Personally, I experience this crisis like my younger self experienced an episode of the Twilight Zone: I'm left trying to square what I understand of reality with the information I'm encountering. Are people REALLY making plans for building their individual financial empires? Are people REALLY having kids? Are people REALLY thinking that life throughout the remainder of this century is going to closely resemble life in the centuries leading up to it? The modern climate crisis is a force literally unprecedented in human history, since at least the agricultural revolution. The scale of this crisis should be thought of in terms of a nuclear war or a sizeable meteor striking Earth's surface at an astronomical velocity. Earth's climate will almost certainly not unravel as quickly as it would under a nuclear catastrophe or a meteor strike, but the effects will most likely resemble them.
Needless to say, it's surreal to hear people obsessing over which wealthy white person will be next to play emperor of the North American continent, or which demographics will and won't get a particular vaccine, or what the state of affairs is with this or that ****ty celebrity. It's surreal to have looked so closely at climate-related information for so many years now -- to have attended seminars, sat through lectures, read scientific journals, interpreted charts and graphs, spoken with actual climate scientists, conducted sit-downs with Oregon Senators and Representatives, etc. It's surreal to see the people around me plan their lives with the belief that human habitat will remain constant in coming decades. It's surreal to see the passion that so many individuals and organizations have for nascent human concerns; the coronavirus, the American economy, Donald Trump, jobs, immigration, competition with China, the consolidation of finances in the upper class, space travel, the media, sports, entertainment, sex, love, rock n' roll, etc. Clearly, we've failed as a society at working an accurate description of the climate crisis in to public consciousness
We're at the end of an immense geological epoch, and practically nobody really accepts it, let alone preparing for it.
The only word that describes the situation, for me, is "surreal."
It’s a frightening scenario the OP lays out in this well written essay and I agree with a lot of it.
I believe we can make changes to preserve a decent way of life for Americans. The average Joe is going to have to accept some new realities but life will go on and humans are tenacious.
Farming in California is hurting because of the climate whether it be climate change or just natural cycles. We can provide all the food the country needs here in the Midwest. The only reason vegetable farming was moved to California was the amount of cheap labor available. My grandpa had bunkhouses on his farm for the laborers when they grew potatoes and tomatoes and sweet corn and you name it. Midwest farmers are going to have to learn how to grow real food again and people are going to go off welfare and unemployment and get their butts to work helping for a wage.
Get the illegals out of the country and keep them out. Stop using corn for fuel, it’s food.
An important sociological lens through which to view World War Two is the nutrition lens. We're often told of pre-war Germany's economic ambitions, their racism, and their hope of ascension to lone global superpower, but we're rarely told that they simply needed farmland. In fact, it's been said that the Third Reich's invasion of Poland had less to do with politics or strategy, and more to do with the acquisition of arable soil for growing food. And, for me, this perspective begs the question, "Were the Third Reich simply following the basic human impulse to acquire food, or did they understand something more fundamental about human behavior, as it relates to the success or failure of a society?" For my money, and given that Marx and Engels both lived in Germany, I suspect that the designers of the Third Reich understood human behavior, both individually and in groups, to be largely a response to material environment. In other words, Hitler knew that, in order to win any serious military conflict with the League of Nations, he would need not only a well-nourished fighting force, but a fighting force psychologically primed for success in every area of life; primed in a way that can only come from the deep psychological security which human beings garner by consistently having their material needs met.
The (white, male, land-owning citizens of the) United States have enjoyed a similar material bounty for over two centuries. On a subconscious level, Americans have assumed success in most pursuits. We expect success in schools. We expect success in the global marketplace. We expect success in the arts. We expect success in the Olympics. We expect success on the battlefield. Without even realizing it, Americans have come to expect an almost effortless location at the top of most social hierarchies, if for no other reason than tradition. And if a single explanation for this expectation can suffice, that explanation must be as follows: throughout the course of westward expansion, Americans have only ever encountered a stasis or an increase in material bounty. Even as capitalism has made material commodities more difficult for the American working class to obtain, forcing the transition of our economy to a credit-based economy, the American standard of living, thanks largely to American military hegemony and the strategic partnering of the American military-industrial complex with foreign powers, has either remained static or improved.
Until now.
Climate change will supercede any and all foundations of American material surplus. With super-droughts in the American southwest, constant hurricanes in the Gulf states, the northward shift of farmable land, the inundation of Southern Florida, the Mississippi River delta, and much of the eastern seaboard, combined with all of the civil fallout of material scarcity, even America's famed "Protestant work ethic" will pale in the face of true material scarcity. There will be no new land to the west, from which to gather material resources. There will be no technological solution; (carbon capture, carbon sequestration, etc., are still well inside their infancy, as if the political will to seriously implement them existed anyway). There will be no international alliance which can be formed against the ravages of diminishing human habitat. There are no bombs that can be dropped on withering human habitat.
Personally, I experience this crisis like my younger self experienced an episode of the Twilight Zone: I'm left trying to square what I understand of reality with the information I'm encountering. Are people REALLY making plans for building their individual financial empires? Are people REALLY having kids? Are people REALLY thinking that life throughout the remainder of this century is going to closely resemble life in the centuries leading up to it? The modern climate crisis is a force literally unprecedented in human history, since at least the agricultural revolution. The scale of this crisis should be thought of in terms of a nuclear war or a sizeable meteor striking Earth's surface at an astronomical velocity. Earth's climate will almost certainly not unravel as quickly as it would under a nuclear catastrophe or a meteor strike, but the effects will most likely resemble them.
Needless to say, it's surreal to hear people obsessing over which wealthy white person will be next to play emperor of the North American continent, or which demographics will and won't get a particular vaccine, or what the state of affairs is with this or that ****ty celebrity. It's surreal to have looked so closely at climate-related information for so many years now -- to have attended seminars, sat through lectures, read scientific journals, interpreted charts and graphs, spoken with actual climate scientists, conducted sit-downs with Oregon Senators and Representatives, etc. It's surreal to see the people around me plan their lives with the belief that human habitat will remain constant in coming decades. It's surreal to see the passion that so many individuals and organizations have for nascent human concerns; the coronavirus, the American economy, Donald Trump, jobs, immigration, competition with China, the consolidation of finances in the upper class, space travel, the media, sports, entertainment, sex, love, rock n' roll, etc. Clearly, we've failed as a society at working an accurate description of the climate crisis in to public consciousness
We're at the end of an immense geological epoch, and practically nobody really accepts it, let alone preparing for it.
The only word that describes the situation, for me, is "surreal."
Wow
It's sad to see that the AGW hoaxsters have some people terrified and actually living in fear of something that does not exist.
This is the tragedy of academic fraud and disingenuousness. We have a person who is actually altering life plans and living in fear over a scientifically false premise. Most liberals are negative, hateful people; now we have terrified to add to that list. When one carries such beliefs, it transfers to every aspect of their life and their negativity is consuming to them and infectious to others.
Too bad the OP does not learn some actual physics and thus be free of their all consuming fear. The truth will always set you free and eliminate fear and indecision. Lies and disinformation does nothing but bring despair to humanity. Liberals are misery merchants and AGW is just one of those examples
PS- We are in a 50 year GRAND SOLAR MINIMUM. For those whe believe in science, not liberal fantasy, we are (and will) experience falling global temps. Fall is starting earlier, there are record low temps in the winter, and winter is lasting longer. If you really believe that increasing CO2 increases temps (it does not), then you should work on making more.
Helplessness is not an inevitable result of the severity of the crisis - severe as it may be. Instead, it's a conditioned response to a world in which the most powerful politicians and corporations want to cast the issue as too difficult and overly complex. To protect their bottom line, those in power want to obfuscate what should be an obvious truth: We can only stop global warming if we end fossil fuel extraction. And we can only do that through direct action, protest, and political revolt.
In order to hide this truth, the powerful have used the mainstream media to make it seem like the answer to the climate crisis is in small, incremental, largely electoral steps. Mainstream news has made everyday Americans feel like we have no options to impact climate change beyond voting, and that's given us the illusion there's nothing else to be done. Until we adjust our media diets and start paying less attention to the everyday, overwhelming destruction, and more attention to the people who are already combating climate change, we'll keep vacillating between overwhelm and helplessness.
I wish people would put their mouth where their wallet is. But we want air conditioning, the latest technology, stuff to decorate our mansions with. Everything that is produced changes the climate and ultimately ends up in a landfill.
OP... do you realize that many of the same people who claim global warming are the same ones jetsetting around to events like the Obama birthday bash... and are the same people living on multi-million dollar oceanfront property.
If they were truly concerned, they would be concerned like you - but they aren't.
It is surreal. The next 3 months will be interesting for sure... to see how much power the authoritarians wield, how much the supply chain gets disrupted, how bad the shortages will get, if they will pump more unlimited QE money into the system in reckless quantities. Seems like the entire western world is on the verge of collapse, with lower birthrates, too many parasites, and not enough money to support all these social safety nets. Plus, a major shortage of workers and this attitude where the people in the middle, the ones the top and the bottom suck from who are the wage slaves watching their cost of living go up by the month, are deciding enough is enough and quitting their jobs. Imagine the entire medical complex collapsing because the already overworked nurses have a third of them quitting which causes a chain reaction where even more quit... meanwhile you have inept hospital administration that cares more about making money than saving lives or treating their workers well.
The top give the middle less and less reason to keep this fragile system going by the week. More and more it seems like the people at the top running things are simply inept and corrupt.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
